--- title: Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews meta_title: 'Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 248 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Aiven for Apache Kafka works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.3 review_count: 248 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-22' parent_category: name: Big Data url: https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data --- # Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews **Vendor:** Aiven **Category:** [Event Stream Processing Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/event-stream-processing) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 248 ## About Aiven for Apache Kafka Aiven for Apache Kafka® is a fully managed distributed event streaming service, that can be deployed in the cloud of your choice. Aiven for Apache Kafka is ideal for event-driven applications, near-real-time data transfer and data pipelines, streaming analytics, and any use case that requires moving huge amounts of real-time data between applications and systems. With Aiven for Apache Kafka you can set up fully managed Kafka clusters in less than 10 minutes — using the Aiven web console or programmatically via Aiven’s API, CLI, Terraform provider or Kubernetes operator. You can easily connect it to your existing tech stack with a fully managed Apache Kafka Connect service with over 30+ connectors. Monitoring your clusters with logs and metrics is also available out of the box via multiple service integrations. Get access to a complete open source ecosystem of streaming technologies and tools around Apache Kafka to fully manage, and operate a real time data infrastructure at scale using: Aiven for Apache Kafka: the core event streaming framework allowing you to transport data within your organization Aiven for Apache Kafka Connect: a fully managed, fully open source, distributed service enabling you to integrate your existing data sources and sinks seamlessly with Aiven for Apache Kafka. Aiven for Apache Kafka MirrorMaker2: a fully managed, fully open source distributed data replication service for cluster to cluster data replication, disaster recovery and geo proximity across multiple regions. Karapace®: a fully open source Kafka Schema Registry that applications can access to serialize and deserialize messages with popular formats such as AVRO, Protobuf and JSON. Aiven for Apache Flink®: a fully managed, fully open source streaming SQL engine for stateful stream processing over your data streams. Klaw: an open source data governance tool that helps enterprises exercise Apache Kafka® topic and schema governance. Aiven is ISO / IEC 27001: 2013, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA compliant. Check our pricing and try our free 30-day trial at https://aiven.io/kafka. ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **easy setup** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, simplifying the start of their real-time data projects. (28 reviews) - Users commend the **ease of use** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, appreciating the straightforward setup and minimal training needed. (23 reviews) - Users appreciate the **smooth scaling** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, enhancing their efficiency without infrastructure concerns. (16 reviews) - Users appreciate the **management ease** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, enabling quick deployment and hassle-free operation. (14 reviews) - Users value the **high reliability** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, benefiting from a fully managed, easy-to-use platform. (13 reviews) - Users value the **24/7 customer support** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, ensuring timely assistance and expert guidance. (12 reviews) - Users appreciate the **deployment ease** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, simplifying management and saving valuable time. (11 reviews) - Scalability (10 reviews) - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, finding it easy to manage and configure. (10 reviews) - Maintenance Ease (9 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find Aiven for Apache Kafka **expensive** as costs rise sharply with increased usage, complicating scalability. (26 reviews) - Users express frustration with the **poor documentation** , which complicates advanced configurations and slows down the process. (8 reviews) - Users note the **limited features** for advanced configurations compared to self-managed setups, impacting their control and flexibility. (7 reviews) - Users find the **operational complexity** of Aiven for Apache Kafka overwhelming, requiring dedicated resources and extensive manual work. (6 reviews) - Users find Aiven for Apache Kafka **not user-friendly** , citing complexities in configurations and minor UI glitches affecting usability. (5 reviews) - Limited Control (4 reviews) - Users struggle with **data management issues** , citing missing features and clunky configuration tools that hinder integration. (3 reviews) - Users face **integration issues** with Aiven for Apache Kafka, particularly regarding configuration management and advanced features. (3 reviews) - Cloud Compatibility (2 reviews) - Poor Customer Support (2 reviews) ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews ### 1. Fast and excellent **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ian P. | Software engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Fast response time, dashboard is pretty intuitive **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** We need more info related to consumer groups, and better logging **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Scaling issues. Much better than rmq ### 2. Kafka for good **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rémi B. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 26, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Lots of integration features // using it with terraform **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Documentation are correct but more documentations would be welcome **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** - Product is constantly improving and adding features - Lots of integration features - Ability to do infrastructure as code - Help to accelerate digital transformation **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Transform an old school ETL oriented architecture to Event Driven Architecture **Official Response from Tuomas Lounamaa:** > Thank you Rémi for your review. Documentation is a key part of our product and community strategy, and we know our work here is not done. If you have specific areas in mind where you've seen gaps in our documentation, we would truly appreciate the feedback. We are adding new documentation daily to: https://developer.aiven.io/ ### 3. It's been an amazing experience. The UI is intuitive. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food Production | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The UI makes it very easy to interact... **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The platform constraints can be limiting **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using a managed solution which allows us to focus on very important business value rather than battling platform issues around Kafka. Working with Aiven has enabled us to iterate faster, provide easier access to our developers to interact with various entities. ### 4. not stable enough **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dumitru-Nicolae M. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven are involved with us, Karapace, networking **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Many accidents, wipeouts, they work hard but still stability remains an issue for us **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** main data source, stream processing ### 5. Smooth managed service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Informative Dashboards, including hints of upcoming (non), supported versions **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** No downsides, for now, I have been using it for less than half a year **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing and configuration of Apache Kafka for my company needs ### 6. I think it works overall very well, with a great web gui that is easily understood! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Broadcast Media | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 31, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** How easy it is to browse around web interface and easily peek at topics, seeing performance and such. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It would be nice if it was possible to actually trigger messages on topics, and peak at individual messages from topic in the web gui, but maybe that is already possible? **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** Try it and you'll never look back! **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's great to dont have to manage your own kafka! **Official Response from Kyle Buzzell:** > Hi and thanks for the feedback! Just wanted to respond to your question. I spoke with one of the members of our engineering team and this is actually possible. If you're talking about producing messages in the former statement, this can be done in the topics tab (between the ACL and Connectors tabs) in the Kafka UI. For the former, it's still the same tab. Every topic is represented as a row and if you look at the far right where there are three reddish icons, you'll notice the one that looks like a download icon — it will actually show you the individual messages. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out via our chat bubble! Thanks again for giving your feedback and using Aiven. ### 7. The SAAS service is very good **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The UI is very helpful understanding schema versions, topics etc. Also the service uptime is great without major incidents recently. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** When the kafka nodes are updating the service becomes a bit slow. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Having a Saas kafka lets our engineers focus on maintaining and developing new features. ### 8. Painless, very easy to set up. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Ease of use, and having a managed system for you. Really brings down the time we spend on it. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I am unable to come up with anything right now. Currently happy with the product. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Transitioning to cloud. Less management for us. ### 9. The aiven kafka cluster was not very stable and we weren't able to reliably connect to it. **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Games | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** the user interface was ok, instructions were intuitive **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** the kafka cluster was not very stable with our message production and customer support couldn't provide much assistance. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** event driven architecture ### 10. Aiven Kafka save my oncall life **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Xia(Sam) L. | Software Engineer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 28, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - Host a self-service Kafka cloud. Save us the operation time and code. - Easy to setup and start to use. So could focus on our core business. - terraform integration **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The connect doesn't integrate with Docker very well. So we use AWS ECS to host our connect service. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** Aiven is easy to setup and use. Great for startup company to try out new ideas about real-time streaming without coding a lot. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aiven saves us operational, deploy, maintain cost. So we could spend the saved time on our core business logic. ### 11. Great capacity of work very reliable and safe. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Donna M. S. | Manufacturing Superintendent, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 29, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The control panel helps a lot with the basic concepts settings. The database service based on the cloud is really reliable, I also like that it makes the way of working easier. The technical support area is also efficient and can really solve some problems quickly. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Some functions are limited, for example the records can not be searched or filtered easily, it would be very useful to search or filter through the different servers. On the other hand the summary of metrics is a list of graphics and you can not choose what I want to see. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** It is very easy to use and very safe, it must be said that some security settings, for example, from the database, you have to dedicate a considerable amount of time, but all starts are difficult, after having done all this configuration everything will be much faster. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was a great solution for the storage of our operational database, the reliability and support offered by this software is very good, this allows us to make the transactions more and more focused on the automated real-time functionality, without this tool it would be something impossible to do. ### 12. Great to have a unified view in one place **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** JM J. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like that it's easy to see consumer groups for each topic. Great sanity-check that ops are performing as expected. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Should be more clear which topic you're acting on when you select "remove" - maybe even prompt to type in topic name before removal is possible. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** Get yourself a dark theme - the control panel's default CSS is very bright after a while. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're just starting to use kafka at work, but I've been using Aiven (along with Kadeck) to interact with / manipulate topics. ### 13. Kafka Developer **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The easy to use interface and the ability to provision topics as required. The User interface is better than most. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Not enough analytics and tools to see what are the root cause of issues. "Is it us or Aiven?" These types of diagnostic tools would be really valuable. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows us to not use our own DevOps teams to manage all the Kafka Brokers, Clusters, and Topics. The ease of use interface allows us to focus on business logic and building asynchronous systems. ### 14. Easy to use and covers all of out needs! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The ease-of-use and being able to have a solution that handles all the infrastructural parts for us. Big plus for an intuitive and easy interface to interact with. Integrates well with our existing software stack. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nothing so far. Haven't used it long enough to give valuable input here. Spontaneously I would say that the documentation could be more thorough. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka applications that are solving crucial business problems and enabling us to utilise important business opportunities. It's obviously saving us a lot of time. It's quite flexible and the customer service is professional. **Official Response from Tuomas Lounamaa:** > Thank you for the feedback! Documentation is a part of our product and community strategy. We know our job is not done yet and would truly appreciate feedback on specific gaps we could fill. We are adding new documentation daily, here: https://developer.aiven.io/ ### 15. Good support, still evolving on some configurations **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Restaurants | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 04, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Good support on chat. I had many questions and mostly were answered on a good time. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** There is not topic specific configuration to use on the Web UI. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** Good support **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Big topics and security are present on our kafka cluster. With it we can implement a good system architecture. ### 16. Aiven was a good fit for a startup just getting into Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charles D. | Senior Software Engineer, Media Production, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** We were comparing Aiven to Confluent, as we wanted a managed solution for our small engineering team. Confluent limited bandwidth and required an up-front commitment for their enterprise tier, whereas we just wanted a monthly bill based on compute power. We also wanted managed Schema Registry and (bonus) Connect, which Aiven had right out of the box. We enjoyed the free trial with the managed components as it let us build out our infrastructure. Also, Aiven just "felt right" when we started using it via the console. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Even though it is insecure, I'd like an option for plaintext connections. It would make it easier to prototype and get started, which was when we were doing our vendor comparing. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a robust system for collecting user interaction events (used for analytics) and inter-service communication for our backend components. So far we are still building, but we enjoy the ability to build real-time applications (our existing Kinesis solution has about a 15 min delay for consuming backend events). ### 17. A Good Stable Kafka Platform **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steve H. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I've been running Kafka for a year in production now and it can be very complex to manage and recover if you ever find yourself in that that scenario. Aiven offers easy upgrade paths and the Avro schema library is still quite buggy in the console but solid when used within Kafka which is invaluable. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The Aiven console is quite buggy and lacks features for user management. We would like more granular control over the RBAC system but at the moment it seems to be admin or nothing. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka is the core of out platform and to have it fully managed so we can focus on building the tech around it gives us great peace of mind. ### 18. Nicely managed, but more work needed **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Good UI for viewing topics, schemas, ACL's , Lag, etc. Terraform support **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Have had a few outages recently. No way of viewing content of topics. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Sharing data across teams without the need for explicit REST calls. ### 19. Super easy to use, no hassle Kafka **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Everything is easy to use. I don't have to go searching through a confusing series of menus to find what I want; everything I use most frequently is just a click away. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Not being able to see the events in a given topic through the dashboard. This isn't the end of the world since I can just use a program like Kadeck to view events, but it would be nice to have. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** It's definitely worth the money. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Currently we've been mostly doing some testing and light development with Aiven but we intend to use this for all of our event-driven microservices in the future. ### 20. first steps with aivrn kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ayoub F. | Tech lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 05, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like the fact of having a web based app to browse the topics and environments. Accessing user groups, partitions... Intuitive for basic use. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The secured access is not explained easily and also the no easy access to list messages on a topic **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka was a solution chosen in our project to handle massive messages communications, aiven has made the use of kafka plateform easier ### 21. Super easy to use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 29, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Ease of use to get onboard and also the migration capabilities of Aiven. Single click **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It isn't quite the same as setting up your own kafka on your servers you host. Many parameters were not available like being able to load custom kafka connectors **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** The biggest benefit is the ability to migrate across cloud vendors in a single click. It's fantastic. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Highly available nodes with ease of migration ### 22. It's just Kafka made easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 16, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Having a nice interface with really good options to better configure and setup kafka topics and so. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I struggled a bit at first to reset an offset from a topic, since we had all those good options I thought there was an easier way of doing that, but yeah, you can always make use of the confluence platform to do it directly through its interface. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** High traffic messages regarding events inside our platform. ### 23. Easy and powerful way to run Kafka as a service **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Easy to setup and integration with Avro, which we use for building schemas for data serializer. Also very easy to get it initially up and running, view, frontend interfaces, very clear and logical. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The validation for the Avro schema in Avro interface is frontend-level. Perhaps it would be a nice idea to prevent sending an invalid Avro schema when calling Aiven API directly. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** Give a try ;) **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Both using Kafka as a service centralize our Avro schema registry so applications can fetch it remotely in runtime-level. ### 24. Easy, reliable and competitively priced Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tapani M. | Chief Software Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 27, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The technical reliability with Aiven is fantastic. In the rare case that something does go wrong, one can count on Aiven putting their best foot forward in support situations. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven is still an up and coming provider and there are rough edges being solved over time. For more total or exotic use cases that could present a problem with lead time, as you might have to negotiate the needed features being implemented. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** All operational (transactional, real-time and cache) database storage is hosted on Aiven. The reliability and ecosystem support of Aiven Kafka specifically has allowed us to transition more and more towards automated real time functionality where before it was technically infeasible. ### 25. Used Aiven Kafka for Staging and Production **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hendrik B. | Head of Data Science, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 10, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Simple set up and monitoring. Can easily understand what is happening in Kafka because we have easy visibility into the different topics. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Until now, everything works pretty well tbh. It's a little expensive, but that's about it. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are doing credit scoring and use Aiven kafka as a message bus for our scoring system. We built a full suite of streaming services around it. ### 26. Very Good Support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rafael L. | Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 04, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The support of Aiven helped us several times, solving a lot of our doubts and issues. They always respond very fast. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** We didn't experience any problem yet. Everything is just working. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** If you appreciate a good support and easy of use, Aiven will be a very good service for you. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Replication of a Postgres DB in a big data analytics platform using Kafka as a service on Aiven. ### 27. Easy to get started with Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Very easy to get started with Kafka. Nice GUI that was easy to navigate. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Fixed Puclic IP of Kafka Connect for white listening purposes would be nice. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Maintanance of Kafka clusters. Creating POCs on Kafka which if you need to host the Kafka cluster yourself is much more time consusming. ### 28. Gets the hassle of maintaining out of the loop **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prajjwol G. | SRE, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I have managed kafka before and aiven gets the hassle out of rebalancing and stuff out of the loop **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** There's no support for signalfx which I don't like. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a bit complex :) ### 29. Awesome, easy and very informative console **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akram Y. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 19, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** You have got everything on the dashboard. I like especially that you can create topics and view Kafka logs and turn off the service. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I could not find any issue so far. Everything looks awesome. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is difficult to maintain your own kafka especially when you on a rush and you run it on demand. ### 30. Easy way to use Kafka without dealing without the need to stand it up yourself **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 10, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - Dealing with the complexity of installing and running the Kafka is taken away from you. - It had sensible configuration out-of-the-box so I didn't have to deal with the myriad of Kafka settings. - Support for log compacted topics. - Integration with other third party services. - I also liked having a 30-day trial period. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - The server certificate is not signed by a public CA, so additional configuration is needed for clients to add a truststore. My guess is that each server cert is dynamically generated for each new user doing the trial, so this is a minor issue. But I wonder if a wildcard cert signed by a public CA would still give the security you want, and give the convenience of not worrying about a truststore. - Aiven requires clients use a client certificate. This is reasonable, but adds friction for trial users who need to deal with creating a keystore for any clients they want to use. If there were documentation that showed the explicit steps to create the keystore (and trustore, from the previous point), that would be very helpful. You could go even further and pre-create the keystore and trustore, along with instructions for how to configure clients to use them, such as a Java client, of the Kafka Tool GUI (http://www.kafkatool.com/). **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I work at Kaazing and we are exploring a partnership with Aiven. We have a hosted platform that streams data from Kafka brokers to browser and mobile apps. We are looking at how easy it is stream from hosted Kafka solutions like Aiven, rather than prospects having to install and run their own Kafka broker clusters. ### 31. I really recommend aiven **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Construction | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** facility of managing the service, starting up and shutting down, creating topics and managing schemas. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** it is a little bit difficult to find logs and to configure ssl. but with online help from aiven it is OK. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** It is a nice service, quick to setup and manage. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Making foundation data available for API request. ### 32. Great Kafka as a service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The transparent pricing Back office interface Terraform provider **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Cannot choose disk size precisely No centralized log (except in an Aiven hosted ES at the moment) **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka cluster hosting ### 33. Data Analyst **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 01, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The interface is really user friendly, clear and clean. It's really easy to set-up new topics on Kafka, really easy to monitory the LAG. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** We can not create an auto export of the kafka logs to create a monitoring tool to see if there is some messages lags on our primes. we need to setup an entire new solution on aiven... **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka messagings ### 34. Aiven Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patrick P. | Co Founder, Sports, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 31, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The best thing about our Kafka setup on Aiven is they supply us with a hassle free, managed, extremely reliable service. No need for any Ops on our side. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Could have a better topics/schema registry UI **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We created independent teams, with independent technology, we're using Kafka to do it **Official Response from Kyle Buzzell:** > Hello Patrick, Thanks for the review. Just wanted to let you know that we have now implemented the first version of schema registry UI and will continue to improve it as we move forward. In the meantime, you can use other open source tools such as Landoop topics UI to connect to Aiven Kafka to view data in topics. Just note that you will need an Business or higher plan to do so: $ docker pull landoop/kafka-topics-ui $ docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 \ -e "KAFKA_REST_PROXY_URL=https://avnadmin:password@your-kafka-service.aivencloud.com:rest-port" \ -e "PROXY=true" \ landoop/kafka-topics-ui Hope you find this helpful and thanks again! ### 35. Great MQ as a service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Real Estate | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 04, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Not worring about infra is the best thing. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nothing so far, everything that I needed from Aiven was ok. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** Easy to use, fair price and stable. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Since we have a microservices architecture we have a lot of events to notify to a lot of services, so, this is what we accomplish with Aiven and without worring about infra in general, just with the business logic. ### 36. Great experience, very easy to get up and running **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like how quickly we can set up and tear down a Kafka cluster. It made the trial painless. Support was on point and I'm glad we can peer it to our AWS VPC. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nothing, so far, we are having a great experience with Aiven. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are building an event-based architecture so we're going to use Kafka for producing and consuming event messages. ### 37. aiven simple kafka management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** M iqbal zulkarnaen N. | Software Engineer, Financial Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 10, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like aiven provide easy and high uptime kafka, though havent tried yet for high performance / price comparison **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** can't modify how I can connect (whitelist IP, another security option) not all features in console software implemented (monitor some messages, performance test, etc) **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** simplify maintaning kafka ### 38. Aiven **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nikhil P. | Software Engineer II, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like the console and ease of using Aiven **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nothing as of now as I have not used the console full time **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using Apache Kafka ### 39. Aiven for Kafka messages **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The AIVEN website is really nice and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** No easy way to extract the lags in the log or from api **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Permanent communication between 2 softwares **Official Response from Kyle Buzzell:** > Thank you for the candid review! Aiven provides detailed gathering of Kafka telemetry and subsequent visualization through built-in dashboards using Aiven PostgreSQL(TimescaleDB) and Aiven Grafana. We also have some additional tools ways to accomplish this. Here are some links you might find useful: 1. Aiven Service Integrations: https://help.aiven.io/services/integrations/getting-started-with-service- integrations 2. Aiven Kafka Telemetry and Dashboards: https://aiven.io/blog/gain-visibility-with-kafka-dashboards/ 3. Datadog Integration: https://aiven.io/blog/datadog-meets-aiven/ 4. Prometheus Integration: https://aiven.io/blog/prometheus-can-now-be-integrated-with-aiven/ ### 40. It all just works **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The Kafka service have been great for our company. We switched from Heroku's offering. It was easy to setup and configure. We are using it for Postgres instances as well. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Everything has worked great, no dislikes yet for me. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Database hosting and kafka hosted instances ### 41. Seamless Aiven Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chandan B. | Big Data Engineer, Education Management, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Support. Top Notch. Ease to spin up new services. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Some features like setting the retention of topic in milliseconds/seconds **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We do not need to worry about managing the cluster! ### 42. Can't complain **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It's nice to not have to worry about managing Kafka as much. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The classic issue of abstracting stuff away from you leaves with with lessened control when you need it. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reducing dev time spent managing infrastructure. ### 43. All in one **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Good one stop shop for services that bigger enterprises charge more than what we're willing to pay. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Some of their API is a little odd and there are a number of manual touch-points in the engagement that we're wary of. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We wanted a Kafka cluster without having to run it ourselves. It was far cheaper than hiring a team to run it for us. ### 44. aiven experience **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Your process to get working is very easy for us , and it matches the way we want to get things work. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Your footprint, our whole team is in Bangalore. Having someone there will be whole lot easier to have timely conversation **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need managed kafka :) **Official Response from Tuomas Lounamaa:** > We've expanded significantly past years and today have offices in Australia, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Finland, USA and Canada. ### 45. Aiven makes everything easier ! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pouria I. | Devops Specialist, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2017 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** What i like about aiven is their support. They are answering really quickly and they help even the problem is not aiven related , I learned a lot of things from them(like pgbouncer) and im looking forward to work with them even more. Another thing is that with aiven I dont have to worry about maintenance and HA. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I'm really looking forward to be able to download the backup that aiven takes automatically. and I want to be able to stream the database logs to another service **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** HA and maintenance and security ### 46. Aiven Kafka review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew M. | CTO, Founder, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2017 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like that I don't have to deal with kafka maintenance. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I wish that there were a way to same / view all messages moving through kafka so that I could debug manually when necessary. My stream is low volume. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use kafka as our message broker in a distributed system setup with Lagom. **Official Response from Kyle Buzzell:** > Hi Andrew and thanks for the review! Just wanted to let you know that Aiven will be adding topics UI in the future as part of our ongoing efforts to improve and fine-tune our console experience. In the meantime, you can use other open source tools such as Landoop topics UI, to connect to Aiven Kafka to view data in topics. Just note that you will need a Business plan or higher. Here's an example of how to do it: $ docker pull landoop/kafka-topics-ui $ docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 \ -e "KAFKA_REST_PROXY_URL=https://avnadmin:password@your-kafka-service.aivencloud.com:rest-port" \ -e "PROXY=true" \ landoop/kafka-topics-ui We hope you find this helpful! ### 47. Fast support. All my questions were answered very promptly. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leandro C. | Director Engineering, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 14, 2017 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The "self-service" approach. We can upgrade and downgrade as we like. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The fact we cannot have a free development environment. **Recommendations to others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka:** If you need a professional support, Aiven is ahead of others. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We don't want to hire a Kafka cluster manager, it's not our core business. Having this as a service is much easier, ### 48. Aiven Review **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2017 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The thing I like best about aiven is that It's managed by someone else **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The thing I dislike the most about aiven is the lack of Kafka connect **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Event driven microservices **Official Response from Kyle Buzzell:** > Thank you for your review and we are glad that you are happy with us managing your Kafka service! We would like a little more information regarding your statement of a "lack of Kafka connect." Is there a specific connector that you are looking for? Currently, we have Elasticsearch and JDBC connectors, and will have an S3 connector out within the next couple of weeks. Thanks again and feel free to connect with us to discuss what you're looking for further. ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Discussions - [What are the characteristics of Apache Kafka?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-characteristics-of-apache-kafka) - 1 comment - [View Aiven for Apache Kafka pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/aiven-for-apache-kafka/reviews?page=5§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-23+04%3A10%3A47+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=b359ae8c-693b-4ff9-b32b-c7861f0c1be4&secure%5Btoken%5D=82e72131bf72e80838efd078b3ea7ba9a16d5dc6e4242fe70f8011a912297d67&format=llm_user) ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Integrations - [Amazon CloudWatch](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-cloudwatch/reviews) - [Amazon S3 Glacier](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-s3-glacier/reviews) - [Apache Maven](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-maven/reviews) - [Kotlin](https://www.g2.com/products/kotlin/reviews) - [LiveChat](https://www.g2.com/products/livechat/reviews) - [Oracle Netsuite Analytics](https://www.g2.com/products/oracle-netsuite-analytics/reviews) - [Python](https://www.g2.com/products/python/reviews) - [Shopify Plus](https://www.g2.com/products/shopify-plus/reviews) ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Features **Data** - Data Processing - Data Sources - Integration - Real-Time Processing **Analytics** - Reporting & Analytics **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - User, Role, and Access Management - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top Aiven for Apache Kafka Alternatives - [Confluent](https://www.g2.com/products/confluent/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (111 reviews) - [Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-managed-streaming-for-apache-kafka-amazon-msk/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (22 reviews) - [Lenses](https://www.g2.com/products/lenses/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (17 reviews)